Quote

A man should not love the moon. An ax should not lose weight in his hand. His garden should smell of rotting apples, And grow a fair amount of nettles.

Czeslaw Milosz

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Czeslaw Milosz
Age: 93 †
Born: 1911
Born: June 30
Died: 2004
Died: August 14
Diplomat
Essayist
Pedagogue
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Clarksburg
West Virginia
Miłosz
Czelaw Milosz
Grow
Apples
Lose
Fairs
Loses
Smell
Hand
Fair
Grows
Garden
Hands
Weight
Men
Moon
Nettles
Love
Amount
Rotting

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I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
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The soul exceeds its circumstances.
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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I know no one worth my envying him.
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Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
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The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
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Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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Language is the only homeland.
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The true enemy of man is generalization.
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From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife, what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains, Only adult toil, the furrow of fate in the palm. Only toil, Nothing more.
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I think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don't know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.
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The revolt against one's environment is usually 'shame' of one's environment.
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Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
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Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
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At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends
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I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me. The word and the thought are over.
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We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
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For a country without a past is nothing, a word That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning, A perishable wall destroyed by flame, An echo of animal emotions.
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